For the Living – Film Screening

In January 1945, after 2 years as a prisoner in a death camp, 10-year-old Holocaust survivor Marcel Zielinksi embarked on a perilous 60-mile journey by foot from Auschwitz-Birkenau through an active war zone to Krakow, Poland. A child’s desperate search for any surviving family members. A journey from Darkness to Light.

Decades later, 250 cyclists from 12 different countries traveled to Auschwitz and re-traced 84-year-old Marcel’s liberation path as a collective act of empathy called Ride for the Living.

Marcel’s dehumanizing Holocaust experience and the empathy demonstrated during Ride for the Living provide a parallel for Humankind’s equally perilous journey between the two extremes of our nature: Dehumanization to Empathy. Darkness to Light.

Igniting the urgent conversation: When will we stop building monuments for the dead and get busy re-humanizing the living? When will we finally say NEVER AGAIN and truly mean it?

FLIFF39 is filled with remarkable films that should be seen by the broadest cross-section of the community. FOR THE LIVING is at the top of that list.

DIRECTORS: Marc Bennett has spent his adult life creating powerful imagery and stories in print and film. As an artist and photographer, his work has been shown in exhibitions throughout the United States and is a part of many public and private collections, including Yad Vashem, Holocaust Museum LA, the Museum of Tolerance, the California Afro-American Museum, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Foundation.

Tim Roper is an award-winning Writer-Director with a diverse mix of experience in both filmmaking and brand building. After graduating with a Film degree from The University of Texas at Austin, Tim began a 25-year career writing and directing short-form branded content and crafting screenplays. Tim is a former resident of Fort Lauderdale.

DIRECTOR STATEMENT: In recent years, we’ve watched human empathy become an endangered resource. Rampant dehumanization has immersed our discourse in genocidal language like never before.

Our objective with this film has been to provide a mirror for humanity and to start a conversation: How can we re-humanize and break a centuries-long pattern of brutality? When will we finally say “NEVER AGAIN” and truly mean it?

Our planet has thousands of monuments that honor The Dead. This movie is an urgent cautionary tale to alert The Living.